


Short For Gilliam

by brawltogethernow



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: 'hot cocoa' vs. 'hot chocolate': fight, Alternate Universe, Crack, Gen, Humor, MULTIPLE spit takes, also a little bitter but look -i- didn't design gil's backstory, except i didn't remember violetta wasn't in paris until after i'd written her in, i can't believe this gilbert and sullivan reference isn't an anachronism, kidfic in chapter 1, very nearly canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 11:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15907779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawltogethernow/pseuds/brawltogethernow
Summary: Gil didn't learn his real last nameorhis entire first name until unusually late in life. Onlyoneof these reveals was grimly dramatic. (Or: Gil isnotshort for Gilbert Holzfäller.)





	1. Castle Wulfenbach

**Author's Note:**

> Based on [this thread](http://brawltogethernow.tumblr.com/post/174916727026/professorsparklepants-brawltogethernow), title stolen from [this comment](http://iztarshi.tumblr.com/post/174894595006/its-gil-actually-its-short-for-gilliam-3).

There was a new kid joining the school on Castle Wulfenbach. His parents were renowned adventurers who had disappeared into _lands exotic_ under mysterious circumstances, so the students had collectively decided themselves to be interested and slightly biased in his favor.

Gil drifted further into the group than he usually did to greet him, unable to quash the hope that the latest student would be somebody he could be friends with, this time.

"And this is Gil," Theo added charitably to the end of a string of jocular introductions summarizing everyone's titles and odds of Sparkiness. Theo had enough social capital to get away with tossing nuggets of civility to Gil sometimes. He wasn't so bad, really.

The new kid smiled nicely at him, because he had not picked up the general social current of despising Gil Holzfäller. Give it a day. "Cool nickname. What's it short for?"

"Short for...?" repeated Gil, voice and expression both blank as fresh sheets of foolscap.

One of the kids giggled, and the new guy finally started to pick up on the opinion he was supposed to hold of Gil Holzfäller. His easy smile congealed a bit.

Gil drifted away to spare him from having to make a choice about staking his allegiance before he'd felt out what it was supposed to be more. He tucked himself away into a chair currently partially hidden from the larger room by an apparatus that had been brought in for them to study, because Madame Von Pinn was still here, which made actually sneaking out of the common area to somewhere else on the ship inadvisable. He worked his book out from where he'd left it under the chair cushion, but rested it on his knees and did not open it back up to the page in chapter 5 he'd bookmarked with a screw.

 _Cool nickname, _thought Gil incredulously.

What if it _was_ short for something? He was a foundling. How would he know? It did _sound_ like a nickname. He'd never really thought about it. What would Gil be short for? Gilbert, probably? Gilford. Gillian. Gilmore? Most of these sounded like surnames, and he already had one of those. And he was almost _certain_ it wasn't a placeholder. Gil...ton. ...Gilberly. _Gilliam._

"Gilbert Holzfäller," he tried out, and almost immediately wrinkled his nose. It sounded like a name, certainly, but he wasn't sure he knew about associating it with himself. And it didn't feel right to assume when he wasn't sure if his name was short for that, or for anything.

He opened his book to hold it in front of his face as a secondary shield. An illustration of sirens in a shoal chatting with brave travelers swallowed up most of his vision.

"Gilbert. Gilbert, Gilbert," he tried again.

He put the book and the bookmark back, got up, and prepared to sneak out of the student area.

"Where are you going?" asked Mingmei, who had opted to stay on the edge of the introductions going on in the center of the room. Out of a fondness for keeping to herself, though, not social ostracization.

"I have a sudden inexplicable urge to track down Sullivan," answered Gil absently, doing mental calculations of how far down the hall Von Pinn must have gotten by now.

Mingmei's eyes narrowed. "You mean that thing with tentacles that lives in the grease traps we _named_ Sullivan?"

"Yes."

She cringed. "Good luck, buddy."

 

The Baron loomed forbiddingly over Gil where he sat before him at his office desk.

"I know you did not break into the records room alone," intoned the Baron.

"No, I did," insisted Gil. "I--"

"I _know_ the Sturmvoraus boy was with you," interrupted the Baron. "I don't see why you defend him. He is _using_ you."

These words carved a sharp jab at the part of Gil that was still bleeding rawly from every kind word or action he'd ever been handed that _had_ been a trick or a trap. But he rallied.

He glowered, loyalty causing his sense of self preservation, having done its very best, to vacate the premises so thoroughly it might as well have fallen off the airship. "Tarvek would _nev_ _er_ ," he snapped, "and there's nothing about me to exploit anyway, _and_ I don't see why you care."

The Baron's nostrils flared very speakingly. Gil's brief life flashed before his eyes. It had involved a respectable amount of climbing, but he could have done with more science.

Then the Baron sighed, anger and posture both deflating as one. Someone else might have seen him and thought he looked much older than usual. To Gil, who was eight, he was already unfathomably ancient, and calculating differences would have been like differentiating between pieces of infinity. Still, the Baron did look very tired, and maybe _hurt,_ which had sort of been the idea, but had been such a reach to begin with that Gil hadn't bothered thinking through the consequences.

"Yes..." said the Baron, voice much quieter than usual. "I suppose you wouldn't see." Which didn't make any sense to Gil. Then he said something that made little sense in general, specifically: "Would you like some hot chocolate?" And he honest-to-cogs reached over and yanked a tea cart with its own burner closer to the desk.

"Hot _cocoa,_ " corrected Gil. He had recently put thought into which one he preferred to say, and saying that had been poorly thought out but had just happened automatically. Even very bright people, which Gil was, were sort of dumb while their age was in single digits. Which Gil's was.

For the Baron, this inanity brought on a deep, only somewhat rational pang of sadness that he hadn't even been able to have enough contact with his son for them to share dialectal peculiarities.

"They are both correct," he said.

"But one sounds cooler." And more mature, Gil thought but did not say. He assumed, incorrectly, that it was a given the Baron would understand cool word choice as a life priority.

The Baron did not. "It sounds pretentiou-- No. No, this is _not_ what we are here to discuss. Though," he said, still discussing it, "I will concede to you, this is made with cocoa powder, not chocolate, so perhaps that is more accurate."

Gil shot the samovar the Baron was grabbing a dubious look. "That can't possibly be as good." Several years before taking up the intellectual pastime of ferreting out what substances available to the students could be fermented into alcohol (most of them, with a little imagination), Gil was already interested in cooking experiments, and his experience with cocoa powder was that it was workable, but innately disappointing as the backbone of any chocolate flavoring.

"It is the way _I_ make it."

Gil watched the process in question skeptically (the Baron tried and failed not to be charmed), but upon receiving an enormous mug and taking an experimental sip conceded (internally, because _argument_ ) that the flavor was much more complicated than he was used to but overall pretty good.

The Baron sighed again. He'd made himself his own mug, which _almost_ made him seem nonthreatening enough for Gil to ask if there were marshmallows available, but not quite. He tapped one finger against it.

"Gil," he said gravely. "...No. _Gilgamesh._ "

Gil spat out his second mouthful of cocoa.

The Baron stared at the mess with the detachment available only to a man who had lived in the sky for nearly a decade and had not had to deal with ants in as much time, and for whom ruined paperwork equaled an unscheduled but lucky break.

"I'm sorry, _Who_ gamesh?" Gil demanded, coughing.

"Yes. Perhaps I should have told you earlier, but I see that tonight I must remedy--"

"Are you _serious?_ " said Gil, who was too stuck on Revelation 1 to acknowledge the approach of Revelation 2: The Revenge.

The Baron's mighty brow furrowed. "...You must have suspected it was short for something?"

"I didn't suspect it was short for _that._ "

Klaus pinched the area with the worst furrowing and started massaging it, folding the skin like a diagram of a hill forming. "Gilgamesh--"

"You're not even going to give me time to process this? You're just digging right in on the Gilgamesh thing."

"...Gil."

"That's me. _Apparently,_ though nobody told _me_ this, it's short for--"

"We really need to talk about tonight. There is...something you need to know."

Klaus did not know any other way to explain the motives of the Sturmvoraus boy (Revelation 3: The Reckoning) in a way his son would really listen to.


	2. Paris

On his first day in Paris for university, Tarvek Sturmvoraus oversaw the movers, circumventing any lethal surprises insinuated at the behest of his extended family and the breaking of _most_ of his possessions. Then, in the high-energy state unique to the excited-yet-exhausted, he went for a walk. He bought a _café au lait_ at a stand. Which wasn't really the Parisian experience, but he suspected that if he didn't keep moving the strain of the day would hit him all at once, and he'd struggle to get up again. Laconic people-watching seated outside of an expensive café could wait.

Then he was nearly bowled over by a rampaging clank.

Smoke Knight training helped him lean out of the way without dropping his drink. Post-relocation tiredness let him do nothing else but blink stupidly after it passed, his hair settling after being ruffled by the near-maiming-experience breeze.

There was a person hanging onto the clank for dear life. At the speed the clank was bounding away they were mostly a blur. But it was a blur Tarvek would know anywhere.

If only because of its stupid hair.

Tarvek had several seconds to identify Gil with his conscious mind to corroborate his gut going, _Ah, there he is_ \--and then he was gone, the denizens of the street churning in his wake. Tarvek stood still, staring after where he'd gone, wondering if that was _Gil's_ clank, longer than he probably should have, because then someone approached him. He had the look of a student. Tarvek had drifted almost up to the grounds of _l'Université_ , which lent some context to the clank. So this was probably going to be one of Tarvek's contemporaries, though he had a certain careless mania about the eyes that spoke of a senior student. He had one eye pinched around an honest-to-gods monocle. Tarvek, who had swapped out his chunky glasses for fashionable pince-nez all of two weeks ago, judged him as he drifted into his peripheral vision, and drank his coffee to try to look busy. But the rubbernecking student had spotted... _whatever_ was going on in Tarvek's expression, and would not be easily deterred.

"Do you know him or something?" he asked Tarvek jovially. "That Gilgamesh Holzfäller guy."

Tarvek spat his _café au lait_ out onto the street.

"Do I know whomst the fuck," he croaked, doubled over wheezing.

"...What was that?" said the upperclassman.

Tarvek straightened. "I said--blue fire, man! By the...by the ectenic ghost of Sir Isaac."

"...That doesn't sound like what you said."

"Shut up," said Tarvek. "But don't, actually, shut up, because I need you to repeat that first thing you said, because I can't possibly have heard you right. I think I was hallucinating, just now. It's the only thing that makes sense."

The upperclassman looked skeptical. He seemed like the details-oriented type.

"Look, I don't care about what I said," said Tarvek.

" _I_ care--"

"--I care about what _you_ said. Just now. A second ago. Please repeat it for me."

"...Do you know Gilgamesh Holzfäller?"

Tarvek doubled over a second time, this time choking on air.

The upperclassman began slamming him on the back furiously, rapidly coming to the conclusion that the new princeling in town had a peculiar medical condition.

"You know," said the upperclassman as Tarvek straightened, with a gleam in his eye, "if you want that cough looked at, some buddies of mine have been scoping around for experimental subjects. Perfectly safe, I guaran--"

"Absolutelynotthankyougoodbye," said Tarvek, already across the street and getting further away at a brisk clip.

"It's for water-based lungs!" the upperclassman called after him desperately. "You could inhale all the beverages you want!"

 

"Tarvek," said Gil, too taken aback to sound anything but soft, the first time they found themselves face to face in Paris. Multiple, conflicting feelings rose within him at once, leaving his face looking sort of queasy.

" _ **Gil** gamesh?_" demanded Tarvek. On the surface it was merely a response, but the tone made it clear it was actually its own indignant question. "Really? _Gilgamesh?_ " he repeated, even more incredulously. Belaboring this point allowed him to shove down other things to say that occurred to him, like: Hello, are you still mad at me; Hello, I'm still mad at you; You hurt me very badly and I still don't understand why; and, I'm surprised to see you actually grew into your eyebrows and even mostly into your hair.

Gil had much more experience being Tarvek's friend than being absolutely-not-Tarvek's-friend-anymore, especially to his _face_ , so he blinked, sighed, and said, "Look, I was as surprised as you are."

"But-- Just-- _Really?_ " said Tarvek.

"Are you going to pay attention to me?" asked the renegade Spark whose secret lair they were both standing in. Gil had noticed a gaping cavern in the road in the Latin Quarter and tracked its source back here. Tarvek had been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, identified as an easy mark, kidnapped, and bodily hauled back here. It had seemed like bad form to shed his mask of ineptitude barely after stepping out of Sturmhalten, so he had allowed it and was now chained artfully to a wall. His shirt had gone missing.

" _No_ ," said both Gil and Tarvek.

"Look, we're kind of having a reunion here," said Gil, voice fed up in a way that lent crispness to it.

"I fail to see how you warrant a moment of our time in the first place," Tarvek remarked snootily, thoughtlessly falling into his part in their verbal double act. "Your methodology is simply terrible. You'll never take over Paris like that."

" _Europa_ ," bit out the Spark, a little spittle-y. "I won't settle for the _city._ I have my sights set on the _continent._ You see--!"

"Yes, see, you won't do that either," interrupted Tarvek.

"You should be using occipital nodes instead of germination couplers there," Gil added helpfully, pointing at the Spark's earthquake device.

"What about those new things from Geneva instead?" Tarvek floated, getting interested.

"Eh, I've seen them," said Gil. "And they explode a lot."

They were ignoring their host again. The _cheek._ She pulled her death ray out from under a table.

Gil smacked it out of her hand. It struck the wall and fell apart into several pieces, fizzing. (Or at least that must have happened. It had looked for a second like it had started to break when the interloper struck it with his _hand._ Which was absurd; he wasn't even a construct.) "We're _talking_ ," Gil snapped forbiddingly.

The random villain geared herself up to do something in retribution. Something terrible. Something drastic. Something preceded by a _rant._ "How **_dare--!_** " she began.

Then she fell to the ground like a stone.

The teenage girl who had knocked her unconscious was revealed where she was standing behind the Spark as she made a new and intimate acquaintance with the ground. The girl had been completely concealed, because she was smaller than the Spark both vertically and horizontally, especially if you included the lab coat, which allowed for a lot of dramatic hunching and a few concealed weapons. (And sometimes emergency crullers.) The girl had dark red hair and wore purple clothes and a scowl. She was holding a cosh. Gil stared at her with an expression that cycled rapidly from confused to alarmed to impressed, which was fair since she had made her way to only a few feet away from someone who considered himself pretty observant in the middle of a fairly sparse open floor plan and he had not noticed.

"Violetta!" said Tarvek. His voice carried a shrill mania that continued to belay his actual words as he went on. "I'm so glad you could join us! You can finally meet my old acquaintance I believe I've mentioned to you, **_Gilgamesh._** "

Violetta blinked and stared at him like he had suddenly and inconveniently come down with soft brain syndrome. (This was how she usually stared at him.) "Who." It was not pronounced like a question, but it actually was one, because Tarvek's cousin usually had a very good memory for his prattling, to her eternal regret, and this didn't sound familiar from his baker's assortment of hyperfixations.

" _Gil ga mesh Hollz fäl ler,_ " said Tarvek, enunciating each syllable like it was its own word. He was just using Violetta as a reflection of his own incredulity, really, which was pretty rude.

Violetta, who was Sparkless but brilliant, put a series of barely connected things together fairly rapidly, and her eyes widened. "Wait, is this guy _Gil?_ _Your_ Gil?"

Tarvek sputtered. "He's not _my_ Gil!"

"I'm not _his_ Gil!" said Gil at the exact same time in almost the exact same tone.

They glared at each other for both undermining their shared point.

"What are you even _doing_ here?" Tarvek hissed at Gil. "Just looking for trouble?"

His accusatory tone came mostly from a place of concern and hurt (and partly from a place of deeply ingrained classism), but this escaped Gil, who suddenly remembered that Tarvek was an evil sneak who had never actually cared for him, but could and would run a long con just to make him think he did. He glowered. Tarvek glowered back. The earlier state of easy conversation fizzled, and when they both left it was in opposite directions, without exchanging goodbyes.

Then they both doubled back because both exits had been collapsed in on themselves and neither of them was carrying explosives (Tarvek preferred knives, and Gil had used all his getting here and might have been slightly responsible for the exit problem in the first place), and had to collaborate to get out through a hole Gil had made in the ceiling breaking in. Violetta's pointed absence from the senses throughout this was to be expected, yet felt somehow judgmental.  
 

 _Gilgamesh Teufel..._ Tarvek thought broodingly later that afternoon in his apartments. _I guess a grand name like that makes a dark kind of sense._ It was truly a sinister name, and Gil would be saddled with a sinister destiny to go along with it. To think--all those years and he'd had no idea.

 

"I wouldn't be having conversations like this if my father could just chill out long enough to _name somebody_ ," Gil muttered morosely into a gently smoking glass of absinthe.

"There there," said Colette, not unkindly but not very sympathetically either. Amused, mostly. She valued Gil's problems for their entertainment factor, and his pain was a nice addition to the ambiance of her third-favorite bar today. As someone with more siblings than most people had entire extended families, her name hadn't been chosen with the particular kind of mindset that went into naming your son after an ancient epic and carefully loading that name down with layers of secret meanings. It had never occurred to her to feel grateful for this before, but now she felt positively blessed.

"If you want to name something after mythical figures," Gil continued to gripe, "get like, an algae culture. And name all the different segments of it. Algae cultures are nice."

 _Definitely_ blessed. Colette sipped her spritzer, thanked her lucky stars, and listened to perhaps her eighth-most ridiculous friend moan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Deleted scenes:_
> 
> After he was thoroughly out of sight of the chatty student, Tarvek shook himself, tossed his paper cup of cooling coffee into a roadside garbage bin (it began making theatrical chewing and swallowing motions and "nyom nyom" sounds), and took off with purpose to complete the next item on his list for the day: "Coincidentally" running into and winning the friendly acquaintance of the woman who was rumored to be the Master's favorite daughter.
> 
> (This endeavor would not escape Gil's ongoing shenanigans, but you already knew that.)  
> -x-  
> " _Whomst?_ "  
> "...Gilgamesh?"  
> "Stop saying Gilgamesh!"  
> "But that's his name?"  
> "You stop that this instant!"


End file.
